I'm buying a new pc for the 1st time in 8 years. Needless to say, there are a lot more choices nowadays. I've looked at Cyberpowerpc, iBuyPC, and Alienware. Is there another good vendor I should be looking at?

I have about $1600 to spend on a gaming system. Here are the basics I am looking at:

well, being an alienware customer (and not particularly happy about it) i would say that a $1600 budget wont get you much in the way of gaming pc. dont go alienware...just my suggestion. im actually working on getting rid of my AW pc and building my own from scratch. unfortunately that is the only input i have for this thread. good luck!

To answer one of your questions, don't bother spending much on cooling. Really the only reason you need better cooling than stock is if you're going to overclock, and if you're not comfortable building your own PC then you probably won't be overclocking.

As far water cooling goes. Don't bother cause unless you know how to deal with water cooling and maintain it. Then its really out of the question. Decent Heat sinks WILL allow for about an extra 33% performance increase on Core2Duos and Core2Quads.

That being said, the only other worth while hardware in that alienware would be the Q9550 (300$~) and the 9800 GTX+ (200$~ give or take 10$). So your paying 1,600$ for a computer that would probably only cost you about 1,000$. You save 600$ you can spend on whatever.

why would you waste money on ddr3/790i/q9550 if you aren't even going to get a gtx280...

don't buy into ddr3 right now as its really expensive for only marginal gains. also the 790i board is crap as most nvidia chipset boards are. the 9550 is a good choice, but unless you're overclocking you could get away with spending less.

i would recommend a biostart ip45 mobo, 4gb ddr2 (crucial/ocz are most commonly recommended) a 7200.11 hdd, e8400 or a 45nm quad if you want a quad, a corsair 550w psu, 4870, case of your choice, optical drive of your choice, and vista 64bit home premium. gonna cost you way less than 1600 and give you a better pc in my opinion.

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Just build your own it will be cheaper. Like a lot of people had said on the thread about it that shall not be named. When you buy something from a vendor it's going to have crappy parts. Personally I would never buy from Ibuypower or cyberpower inc, seeing as how when they started to take off about 4-5 years ago they were gluing GPUS' onto the motherboard. On top of that I bought an Alienware when I first started to get into PCs, worst decision ever. The so called Alienware memory they sent with the PC was more generic than Patriots Value line. Plus why would you buy it made when at newegg for 1600 you could get a beast.

All you need is:
E8500
260 or a 4870
4gb of ddr2 ram because you can
a P45 board
the rest is yours to choose really those components would let you play Crysis or Far Cry 2 flawlessly. Id link specifics but I'm doing HW .

case and optical drives etc you can decide, i would also go with a Wd 640gb 16mb cache hdd since they are fastest write speeds, but if you need more space then a seagate 32mb cache 750gb or whatnot will be good.